The Madness of Crowds--A Novel

by Louise Penny

  Opening it, he saw on the title page, For Honoré, who knows a lot about the madness of crowds. Stephen.

  It was dated the year Armand had been born.

  Honoré Gamache, Armand’s father, had been a conscientious objector when Canada declared war on Germany. He gave impassioned speeches against conscription, arguing that Quebeckers shouldn’t give up their lives to protect far-off imperial powers. He became the face of Québec resistance to the war.

  He did, however, join the Red Cross and worked as a medic and ambulance driver.

  But after going into the concentration camps, seeing what had happened, Honoré Gamache deeply regretted his stand.

  Profoundly ashamed of himself for not recognizing his moral duty sooner, he spent the rest of his short life making amends. Including sponsoring two refugees. The woman, Zora, who would become Armand’s de facto grandmother, and raise him after his parents died. And Stephen Horowitz, Armand’s godfather, who defended Honoré at every turn. Pointing out to his detractors the great courage it took to be a medic. To be on a battlefield without a weapon. There to save lives, not take them.

  And the great courage it took to admit a mistake.

  Still, the name Honoré Gamache remained for a generation synonymous with cowardice, and Armand’s father was often heckled when he gave speeches in support of the Red Cross and refugees. He took his son to the events, knowing what would happen.

  He’d bend down and assure little Armand that ça va bien aller. That these people had a right to their opinion, and many had died for that right.

  Armand, from a young age, knew a lot about courage, and a lot about the madness of crowds.

  “I’ve never read it.” Armand handed the book to Stephen.

  “You should. It’s about what happens when gullibility and fear meet greed and power.”

  “Nothing good?” said Armand, with a small smile.

  “You’re smarter than you look, garçon.” Stephen tapped the cover. “People will believe anything. Doesn’t make them stupid, just desperate. Interesting that the Chancellor would be reading this. She’s friends with Professor Robinson, right?”

  “It seems so.”

  “Delusion and madness,” Stephen said, and handed the book back.

  “I just need to ask you a few questions about last night,” said Armand. “We believe Madame Schneider was killed between ten to midnight and a few minutes after.”

  “When we were all focused on other things,” said Stephen.

  “Exactly. Where were you?”

  “In the living room, then Ruth and I went outside to watch the fireworks.”

  “In the cold?”

  “Well, you never know.”

  Armand finished the thought. When it will be for the last time.

  “Did you see Debbie Schneider in that time?”

  “To be honest, Armand, I really don’t know what she looked like. I knew the professor had arrived with Colette and someone else, but I didn’t pay attention to the someone else.”

  “Did you notice anyone going into the woods?”

  “No. We got back inside pretty quick once the fireworks were over.”

  They went over Stephen’s impressions of the party. Like everyone else, he hadn’t seen anything specific, but he had noticed the tension, erupting at times into acrimony.

  “She and the Asshole Saint sure went at it,” said Stephen. “You don’t suppose he did it?”

  “At this stage, everyone’s on the list.”

  “Including me?” Stephen said with a laugh. But when Armand didn’t laugh with him, he studied his godson. “You don’t really think I’d kill Madame Schneider, do you?”

  “Not her, no. But do I think you’d murder Abigail Robinson? Possibly.”

  Instead of taking it as an insult, as a slight on his moral character, Stephen Horowitz seemed to see it as a compliment.

  “She needs to be stopped, it’s true.”

  Armand leaned back and stared at his godfather. “Are you—”

  “—confessing? No. Would I if I’d done it?” Stephen stopped to consider. “Yes, I probably would.”

  “Life in prison isn’t such a threat.”

  Stephen smiled. “And I’ve seen the fireworks. You know, while the professional shows are spectacular, I prefer the little neighborhood ones. Seeing the children trying to write their names with sparklers. Waving them like magic wands.”

  Stephen moved his arm, as though conducting. Armand could see he was writing a name. Not his own. Stephen was writing I-d-o-l-a.

  * * *

  “I see that Madame Schneider’s parents have been notified,” said Isabelle Lacoste.

  “Yes, the police in Nanaimo went to her parents’ home last night.” Jean-Guy looked at the large clock that had been placed on the wall. There was a three-hour difference between Québec and British Columbia. “We’ll call in a few hours. Also need to speak to the head of Professor Robinson’s department at the university.”

  Since they didn’t yet know who the intended victim was, they were in the awkward position of having to treat it as though both Debbie Schneider and Abigail Robinson had been killed.

  * * *

  “Does the one hundredth monkey theory mean anything to you?”

  Stephen had left, and now Armand and Reine-Marie were sitting quietly in the study, as they often did. Armand going over the reports and organizing his thoughts, and Reine-Marie sorting through the boxes of material from her client.

  She removed her reading glasses and looked at him. Her eyes were bloodshot, with dark circles under them from lack of sleep. Where Armand, more used to murder, had fallen asleep quickly, Reine-Marie had lain awake thinking of the dead woman.

  Seeing Debbie Schneider move about the comfortable living room of the Inn, oblivious to what was about to happen. Unaware that someone in that room was about to kill her.

  If ever there was reason to lie awake, watching the curtains flutter, it was that.

  Someone they knew was dead. Someone they knew had done it.

  “One hundred monkeys, Armand? Are you saying there’s actually a theory?”

  “It’s something Vincent Gilbert said last night when we were talking about the growing enthusiasm for Professor Robinson’s findings.”

  He told her about the one hundredth monkey theory.

  “That’s pretty interesting,” she said when he’d finished. “I wonder if it’s true.” She looked at the document on her lap. No monkey on that one, though there was one in the margin of an old letter she’d just read from Enid Horton’s sister.

  “I’ve lost track of how many monkeys I’ve found so far,” she said. “Might be a hundred in total. Or more. Or less. I have one more box to open after this one. Can’t imagine the number really matters.”

  “I agree,” said Armand. “The idea is that there’s a tipping point. There certainly seems to have been for Professor Robinson and her campaign.”

  “You think we’ve passed it, Armand?” she asked. “There’s no going back?”

  “No, I’m not sure she’s gathered enough support yet. But I think she’s close, thanks to publicity around the shooting. And then there’s what happened last night.”

  “Yes, about that. Any idea…?”

  “Who did it?”

  Armand talked openly with his wife about all his cases. Always had, always would. If he didn’t trust her, why had he married her? And she him.

  “It’s so difficult. We need to work out whether Debbie Schneider was the intended victim, or if a mistake was made.”

  “How do you do that? Oh, wait. Don’t you normally just ask Jean-Guy and Isabelle to do it?”

  “While I sit around eating bonbons? Normally, yes. I’m not hopeful. I suspect they’re up there getting facials.” He smiled, then grew serious. “The thing about murder investigations is that the crime often begins long before the act. The killer starts down that path sometimes years earlier. Sometimes without even knowing it themselves.”

/>   “But something started it off,” she said.

  “Oui. There’s always a reason, even if reason doesn’t figure into it. It almost always starts with some emotion. A hurt feeling. A slight. An insult, a betrayal. It digs in like a hook, and festers. Dragging that person toward the cliff. It could take years, and for some it never goes that far. It becomes a low-level hum of anger all their lives. But for others…?” He raised his hands.

  “If it’s that small, Armand, how do you find it?”

  “We can’t. Not the original offense. Not often anyway. Instead we collect evidence. We collect facts. But we also, along the way, collect feelings. Try to pick up the trail of unhealthy emotions. Of perceptions that are just slightly off. Like mariners at sea. If their course is off by a tiny amount at the beginning, by the end they’re completely lost.”

  The same, he knew, was true of murder investigations. A misstep early on, now, could leave them so far off course they would either fail to find the killer or, worse, arrest the wrong person.

  Or, worse still, delay things so much there was another murder.

  “You look for someone lost?” she asked.

  He smiled. “I guess so. The problem with that is that we’re all lost at times.”

  Reine-Marie nodded. She knew that everyone in Three Pines, from Clara to Myrna, from Gabri and Olivier to Ruth and even Rosa, had found the village because they’d lost their way.

  Even she and Armand. They’d come to live here when they were most adrift.

  She knew, though, as did Armand, that not everyone lost was fortunate enough to be found. Some came to the end of the world, and kept going. To the place where monsters and madness lived.

  She looked at the documents spread at her feet and wondered what had happened in Enid Horton’s life to compel an elderly woman to draw monkeys on everything.

  But she stopped herself. They weren’t on everything. Only certain documents. And it wasn’t an elderly woman who’d drawn them. Not all, anyway. She’d been a young woman, a young mother, when it had started.

  As Reine-Marie had gone through the boxes, a picture had emerged of an absolutely normal woman of her generation. A woman who’d married young. Raised a family in the sixties and seventies. Who’d prepared Christmas and Thanksgiving meals, kept recipes and school report cards and gifts her children had made, that only a mother could find precious.

  A woman who’d volunteered at the local hospital and had gone home, closed the door, and drawn monkeys on random letters and bills. Though Reine-Marie now wondered just how random they were.

  “We also have to consider that the attack last night is connected to the shooting at the gymnasium,” Armand was saying.

  “You mean someone at the party tried to finish the job?”

  “Could be. But I don’t see how. The most likely accomplice was miles away in police custody. They’re interviewing him this morning. The connection might be more nebulous. The first attack might have given someone the idea for the second. Emboldened them.”

  After he left, Reine-Marie decided to sort the papers, putting those with the odd drawings in one pile. Those without in another.

  As she looked at the growing pile, Reine-Marie thought there might be one hundred monkeys after all.

  * * *

  Armand stopped in at Ruth’s cottage on his way up to the Inn.

  In summer the old home looked almost abandoned, with its rickety front porch and wobbly railing and the shutters half falling off. The paint was chipping, and her lawn was mostly crabgrass.

  If Ruth had tried to make her home uninviting, she could not have done a better job. And there was a fairly good chance she did try.

  Friends in the village had, more than once, offered to repair and repaint and weed, but she’d have none of that. Her home, it seemed, was a reflection of herself. Ramshackle. A little wonky. Definitely askew. She had no need of repair. And neither did her home.

  “And for your information,” she told Gabri when he’d shown up with gardening gloves and a trowel, “I like weed.”

  “Weeds, you mean,” he said.

  “Maybe,” said the old poet.

  He looked more closely at her garden and the healthy growth.

  Armand was consulted and assured Gabri it was not marijuana. “Though that doesn’t mean she doesn’t smoke it.”

  Now he stood on the same spot and looked at the same little cottage.

  In winter it was transformed. Covered in snow, with icicles dangling like crystals from the eaves, it looked like a gingerbread house. Made by happy children.

  It went from the least attractive to the most attractive home in the village.

  Such, Armand thought as he shoveled his way up the path, was the power of perception.

  When he’d finished, and plunged the shovel deep into a drift, the front door opened a crack. “What do you want?”

  “I need to speak with you, Ruth, about last night.”

  There was a hesitation. Then the door was opened wide, and he stepped quickly inside.

  A fire was lit in the living room, fortunately in the fireplace. Almost everywhere he looked were books. It was the literary equivalent of a blizzard. They were stacked up against the walls, as though blown there. In some places they were four, five feet deep.

  Books served as side tables next to the worn sofa, and stacks of books held up a plywood plank, creating a coffee table. Though in Ruth’s home it was a scotch table.

  Many of the volumes, Armand suspected, had been “borrowed” from Myrna’s bookstore.

  Ruth shoved a few off the sofa and pointed.

  He was hot from his exertions and took off his parka and boots. Then he sat, slowly, carefully. Executing a controlled deep knee-bend, until he felt the cushion sag beneath him. He’d made the mistake, only once, of letting himself collapse into the sofa as he did at home. But this sofa had almost no springs, so he had hit the wood floor with a bruising bang and felt one lone spring where no spring should be. He’d leaped up. And never made that mistake again.

  Rosa was nestled into a small dog bed by the fireplace, muttering in her sleep. It sounded, to Armand, like “Merde, merde, merde”—breath—“merde, merde, merde.”

  He wondered how long it would be before little Honoré or even Idola …

  “So, speak,” said Ruth.

  “I meant you speak, I listen. How well do you know Abigail Robinson?”

  The question surprised Ruth, and that wasn’t easy to do.

  “I see you’ve decided to start with a stupid question. Perhaps to set the bar low. What in the world makes you think I know her? I’ve never met her. We didn’t talk last night. Or ever. Have you been harvesting my weeds?”

  “And Debbie Schneider?” he asked.

  “The woman who was killed.” Ruth paused. She never took death, especially violent death, lightly. Perhaps she found it sobering, he thought, being one insult away from it herself.

  Her rheumy eyes caught the reflection of the fire, and he saw, as he always did, intelligence burning bright.

  “No. I didn’t speak with her either. I spent most of the night talking with Stephen.”

  “Did you see anything that, given what happened, makes you wonder?”

  Armand knew that while she claimed to be oblivious to others, it was an act. Ruth Zardo was keenly aware of others. Their presence and their feelings.

  Whether she cared how people felt was another matter. But little escaped her. And most was rendered into poetry.

  Long dead and buried in another town

  My mother isn’t finished with me yet.

  Yes, he thought, as he watched her think, it took a special gift to write about the personal, and yet touch a near universal experience. He knew that his own parents, long dead and buried in another town, informed a lot of who he was and what he did.

  He thought that was probably true of most people.

  “I noticed the tension between that Robinson woman and the Asshole Saint,” said Ruth. “Wha
t were they talking about?”

  “It was an exchange of insults.”

  “Damn. And I missed it. Were they good?”

  “Well, she likened him to Ewen Cameron.”

  Ruth’s face hardened. “How did Dr. Gilbert take that?”

  “He shrugged it off. Said it was a predictable insult. Anyone who wants to try to undermine a McGill medical grad throws Cameron at them. What is it?”

  “Nothing. I knew a local woman, a few years older than me, who was apparently one of his subjects. Just rumor.” She paused. “He was a monster, of course.”

  “Yes.”

  Armand felt inside his pocket and, bringing out what looked like a campaign button, he placed it on Ruth’s scotch table.

  “What’s that?” she demanded, staring at it.

  “It’s being sold at Professor Robinson’s events, to raise money for her campaign.”

  Before the shots had been fired and the gym had descended into near pandemonium, he’d considered buying one of the buttons from the concession, to show to Ruth. But he couldn’t bring himself to give any money, however small, to that cause.

  He’d found two of them on the floor among the other articles dropped in the rush to get out. They’d been gone over for prints and DNA. And then he’d taken them.

  He watched as she picked it up. Looked at it. Then at him.

  “This’s mine,” she said. He knew what she meant. Not her button, but what was written on it.

  Or will it be, as always was, too late?

  The angry chant of “Too late! Too late!” by Robinson’s supporters momentarily filled the comfortable little sitting room.

  It was from a poem, ironically, about forgiveness.

  “I don’t understand,” said Ruth, holding up the button. “Why’s my poem on this?”

  “Professor Robinson didn’t ask permission to use it?”

  “No, of course not. I’d never…” Her voice trailed off.

  “What is it?”

  She’d turned to stare into the fire, her thin, blue-veined hand at her face. Then she got up and returned a minute later with her computer, opening it on her lap.

  “Oh, shit.”